Al Gore isn’t just the Democratic party’s conscience on climate change. He’s also become its inner voice in defending Edward Snowden in the debate over government surveillance overreach.

It’s a familiar spot for the former vice president, released from past political constraints and free to speak his mind on yet another issue that he’s dedicated decades to during his career in Congress, the White House and now as a private citizen who can still make a headline when he breaks from his party orthodoxy.

Gore added yet more distance between himself and other top Democrats during a technology conference Tuesday when he said the former National Security Agency leaker should be cut some slack for breaking the law because of the secretive government programs that he helped expose.

“He clearly violated the law,” Gore said during Tennessee’s Southland Technology + Southern Culture Conference when asked whether Snowden was a traitor or a hero. “But what he revealed in the course of violating important laws included violations of the United States Constitution that were way more serious than the crimes that he committed, and so in the course of violating important laws, he also provided an important service.”

While Democrats including President Barack Obama have embraced the need for NSA reforms in the wake of the Snowden-inspired disclosures, few have gone so far as to defend the former U.S. government contractor who has been living in Russia for almost a year.

Former President Jimmy Carter told the Washington Post in March that he’d consider giving Snowden a pardon if the leaker returned to the U.S. and was convicted and sentenced to death. But that’s a big contrast with other Democrats, including Secretary of State John Kerry, who called Snowden a “coward” and a “traitor” in late May in an interview with MSNBC.

For Gore, Snowden’s revelations are far more important than the legal quagmire he’s now stuck in. In a wide-ranging March interview with POLITICO, the former vice president answered the ‘whistleblower versus traitor’ question with the same sort of nuanced reply.

“I have a more textured view than either of those labels would describe,” Gore replied.

The former vice president explained that while he wasn’t fully aware of the facts surrounding Snowden’s case, he said the government contractor didn’t appear to have much of a choice but to leak the information he had to journalists.

“It’s not clear to me that reporting what he discovered to his supervisors was a viable option for him,” Gore said. “But I think what he has disclosed has made possible an absolutely essential conversation.”

Gore noted in the interview that Snowden wasn’t the first to expose what the NSA was up to — here, he plugged his own 2013 book ‘The Future.”

“I wrote about this in my last book and had some of the revelations that Snowden put out really were put out by some other senior whistleblowers in the NSA who were kind of ignored. We had them. There were interviews with them. I talked with them,” Gore said.

“I used to be on the intelligence committee myself,” Gore added. “And of course in the White House had a long briefing every single day about this. And so I really respect what the intelligence [community] does. I’m really grateful for what they do as an American to protect us. But come on. This is ridiculous. It’s obscene overreaching.”

Gore also said in the interview that he was “encouraged” by Obama and Congress trying to move legislation that would end the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records — a bill has now passed the House and awaits action in the Senate. The legislation, he said, is “really very important” for protecting privacy while still allowing U.S. officials to protect against terrorist threats.

“If they have reason to suspect that a terrorist is here in area code 615 in Nashville, Tenn., in middle Tennessee, then by all means go after them, I want them to. All of us want them to,” Gore said. “But does that mean that they ought to collect the phone records of every single person in area code 615? Hell no! That’s ridiculous. That’s ridiculous.”

And the former vice president warned that what the NSA has been doing can have significant long-term consequences.

“Democracy is among other things a state of mind,” he said. “And if people are given the feeling that they have to be careful what they say lest it be misinterpreted because somebody’s keeping a record, that chills the First Amendment rights that are at the very core of what American democracy is all about. This is really dangerous.”

Gore’s remarks Tuesday, reported by the tech site PandoDaily, which was a co-sponsor of the conference, covered much the same ground. He said he would “push [Snowden] more away from the traitor side.”

It’s a view that’s a long way from where other top Democrats land on the topic.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, asked earlier this year about Snowden being floated as a Nobel Prize candidate, replied, “Are you kidding? If I were on the committee, I sure wouldn’t vote for him.”

“From my perspective, I’d have had a lot more respect for him if he’d done what other people who challenge laws have done, which is sit on the bus, on the front of the bus if you’re Rosa Parks, challenge the law…And then take it to court,” Levin said in the interview.

“Maybe he could have made a case that he somehow or other is doing a public service. But at least I’d have the respect that he was willing to stand up for what he believed in,” Levin added. “And I don’t have that kind of respect for him because he wasn’t willing to test his beliefs in a court the way so many other people in this country have.”